Funk

Eras

• Afrobeat, Fela Kuti returning from the United States in 1969 and turning a love-song band into a political one, with Tony Allen on drums, who Fela himself said the music could not have existed without. The Kalakuta Republic declared independent of Nigeria, the 1977 raid by around a thousand soldiers in which his mother was fatally injured, and the long line after him: Ebo Taylor, Orlando Julius, Mulatu Astatke in Ethiopia, and Antibalas in Brooklyn.
• Go-Go, Washington DC's own funk, and the one strain defined by what happens BETWEEN the songs: Chuck Brown's Soul Searchers played continuously, one number segueing into the next, so the crowd never stops. Bustin' Loose in 1978, Trouble Funk and Rare Essence, E.U.'s Da Butt, and the 2020 vote that made go-go the official music of the District after the DontMuteDC campaign.
• Brazil, Two different musics that share a country and a word. First the 1970s Black Rio scene, samba and soul and funk at once: Tim Maia, Banda Black Rio, Cassiano, Gerson King Combo, and the Baile da Pesada dances that filled Rio warehouses. Then, from the late 1980s, funk carioca, built in the favelas on a Miami bass loop known locally as the Volt Mix, which became a national music and then an export.
• James Brown, The band that had to relearn its instrument. Papa's Got a Brand New Bag cut in one February 1965 session, Cold Sweat two years later with essentially one chord, and Funky Drummer, whose eight unaccompanied bars became the most sampled break in music. Plus the people who actually played it: Jimmy Nolen's scratch guitar, Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley in the horns, Bootsy at nineteen, and Clyde Stubblefield, who got no songwriting credit and no royalties.
• Women of Funk, Not a footnote and not a backing vocal. Betty Davis writing and producing her own records and being boycotted and radio-banned for the persona, targeted by religious groups and by the NAACP; Lyn Collins, whose Think (About It) carries five separately sampled breaks and became It Takes Two; Chaka Khan with Rufus, Marva Whitney, Vicki Anderson, LaBelle and the Pointer Sisters.
• Jazz Funk, Jazz musicians playing funk without giving up the harmony. Herbie Hancock taking the Headhunters to the biggest-selling jazz record to that point, Roy Ayers on vibes, Donald Byrd, George Duke, Grover Washington, the Crusaders and Idris Muhammad, plus the modern end where Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington pick the same thread back up.
• Crossover, The records that left the genre and went to pop, soul and disco: the Isley Brothers, Chic and Nile Rodgers, the Average White Band, the Brothers Johnson, Stevie Wonder's clavinet run, Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes scoring films, and Bill Withers, who was working in a factory making toilet seats for aircraft when he cut his first record.
• Horn Bands, Funk as a large ensemble with a brass section carrying the line. Kool and the Gang, the Ohio Players, Earth Wind and Fire building a cosmology to go with the arrangements, Tower of Power's rhythm section, the Bar-Kays, Mandrill, Con Funk Shun and Maze. The point of a horn band is that a dozen people have to breathe together.
• Deep Funk, The 45s. Regional bands, small labels and one-off singles that never crossed over and became the raw material for crate diggers and samplers instead: Slave, Dyke and the Blazers, Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band, the Blackbyrds, War's long grooves, and the rare-groove records that were worth more in London in 1987 than they ever were on release.
• Sly and the Family Stone, A band integrated by race and by gender in 1966, which almost nothing else was. The run from Dance to the Music to Stand!, then There's a Riot Goin' On in 1971, recorded largely alone in a home studio with a drum machine he overdubbed on top of because he disliked the presets. Larry Graham inventing slap bass in the same group. Sly died in June 2025.
• New Orleans, The oldest root in the archive. Professor Longhair importing Afro-Cuban clave into New Orleans R&B in 1949, the Meters cutting Cissy Strut and Look-Ka Py Py as the house band for half of southern soul, Allen Toussaint arranging, the Neville Brothers, and the second-line rhythm that everything here is ultimately downstream of.
• Parliament and Funkadelic, One group of musicians under two contracts, because Clinton lost the rights to his own band name around 1969. Funkadelic went guitar-heavy on Westbound and Eddie Hazel played ten minutes over his mother's death; Parliament went horn-led on Casablanca and landed a stage-prop spaceship in front of arena crowds. Bernie Worrell's synthesisers underneath all of it, and a catalogue that later financed half of West Coast hip hop and two landmark copyright cases.
• Boogie and the Talk Box, The pivot around 1980, when the horn section gave way to synthesisers and a drum machine. Zapp and Roger Troutman singing through a plastic tube, the Gap Band, Cameo, the SOS Band, and Minneapolis, where Prince, The Time and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis built a sound out of the same components and sold it to everyone.
• Studios and Stages, The rooms. King Records in Cincinnati where Cold Sweat and Funky Drummer were cut, Stax in Memphis, the House of Soul in Bushwick, the Apollo, and the festival stages where most of this music is still played by the people who made it and by the people who inherited it.
• The Instruments, The hardware that made the sound. The clavinet and the wah pedal, the talk box and its plastic tube, the Minimoog and the ARP, the Fender Rhodes, the horn section as a single instrument, and the drum kit set up for a break rather than a solo.
• G-Funk, The West Coast rebuilding P-Funk from the sample up. The Chronic in December 1992, its bed of Atomic Dog and Knee Deep and Funkentelechy, the slow tempo, the high synthesised lead and the laid-back delivery. Warren G, Snoop, DJ Quik and Above the Law, plus the copyright fight that a two-second Funkadelic sample eventually produced.
• The Revival, Funk recorded on tape again, deliberately. Daptone founded in 2001 out of a collapsed label, working in a converted Brooklyn house with no computers; Sharon Jones releasing her first record at forty after working as a corrections officer; Charles Bradley, Lee Fields, the Budos Band and Antibalas. The Dap-Kings played on Back to Black in 2006, which is the moment this sound reached a stadium audience, and the line runs to Durand Jones, Black Pumas and Vulfpeck now.